Well I'm making it public...

So Haley and a I were eating lunch today when she said "You know we've been here two months?" And I said "No we haven't, we left on the twenty-fourth, so we still got a couple of days." Then I looked at the calendar, for some reason I thought it was the twenty second. It's been two months. So sit back and enjoy the blog post that has been two months in the making...

For a myriad of reasons, and I believe most everyone has heard through the rumor mill by now, China and I will be breaking up around the first of the year. We've had about three or four bad weeks together, and I don't see this relationship improving. So I decided to end it early about three weeks ago. Of course, we'll still be together for a couple of more months just for posterity's sake, but as of mid-January China and I will "just be friends" for the foreseeable future. Leaving China early has been one of the toughest choices I have ever made--one that has revealed several things about myself that I did not know before, and well it's not pretty--but I can't think of a decision that has put me more at ease. China and I weren't meant to be, and I can say that with some confidence; the cultural high lasted about two days, then culture shock hit and lasted about two weeks, and then that subsided and a month and a half later I still want out. I don't want to dilute the term "miserable" by describing my self as just that; because I'm not. However, China exposed some serious issues that I won't fix by staying for ten months and doing damage to myself and no good for other people.

THINK about me (keep cool with the jargon here people) because I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would come to a foreign country and discover that I am a bigot. Or it could be the exact opposite, and I just want to have a conversation with someone that respects me for who I am and not some superficial characteristic that I cannot control. I really can't tell the two apart, but I believe the latter has lead to the former. Either way it has been wearing me down for the last few weeks (I should go to a country where the people arn't nice, you know like New York City). I love these people, but it's just these aspects that have made basic human communication a bear and because of that burden I've turned into a hermit living off the basic essentials in life: facebook, guitar, email, water and chocolate bread (and running, man am I starting to love running). I do leave the apartment daily, but even those ventures usually lead to thinking the things I wrote about on my blog yesterday. This country and it's people are wonderful, probably the nicest in the world, but like I said the problem is all mine.

Oh well, this has been a pretty intimate post. I hope the random guy in Montana that ran into this blog on accident enjoyed it; or maybe the friend I haven't talk to since middle school; or the college classmate I've never talked to in my entire life, who has been secretly facebook stalking me for the past year (you know who you are); or maybe even one of my students. It's interesting finding out who actually reads this thing. I just discovered I have 90 hits on my empty profile page. I'm sorry about that, if I knew people were looking at it I would have put something there. Any way, have a good night, all you crazy Americans out there.

"I'll see you in the morning if nothing happens."